An important part of leadership is being able to hold two things in your mind at once: Dealing with the reality, whatever it may be, and focus on hope for the future. Any leader helping an organization through challenges needs to be able to do both.

When I arrived in Ford, a decision was made to sell many marquee brands. This was because 85 per cent of the sales were from Ford and Lincoln brands. We were clear that for the company's strong future, we needed to focus on the Ford brands.

Nothing will ever have the impact that 9/11 had on Boeing and on the world. It just changed things overnight.

If you have to improve your fuel efficiency every year, it leads to innovation.

I'm not saying that kids today have everything, but with the Internet, it's like, you have it there, so use it! I know a bunch of kids who are into cassette tapes now. Cassette tapes suck! Why not use your iPod?

Whether you're a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place.

Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.

If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.